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There are more than 800 journalism schools in China, but there has never been a standardized set of curricula for journalism education. Lacking of a standardized guideline forced journalism schools to design their own courses, and also brought about a severe problem that every journalism school is creating their own curricula with their own focus. In such an environment of journalism education, the Chinese schools of journalism and communication are mass producing journalism students who are unqualified for the demand of the media industry. The aim of this project is to design a curriculum for use in Chinese journalism schools, in order to raise the teaching standard of them. It will use the UNESCO Model Curricula as the foundation of the work. The project includes consultations with top Chinese journalism education educators and discuss with journalism school deans and chairs, as well as professors and lecturers, in order to adapt it to the Chinese context, and finally produce a set of standardized curricula, which is a revised version of the UNESCO Model curricula. With the help of the journalism education committee in the Chinese ministry of education, the project will be pushing forward the standardized curricula nationally. The Project include one national training workshop for 40 journalism professors (split in working groups) and lecturers in order to let them understand the curricula and effectively use the curricula; one national symposium to discuss Chinese journalism education reform and adoption of the standardized curricula. It will also publish a journalism textbook on news reporting and writing based on the standardized curricula, construct a website for the project as an online training platform, and produce supplementary training material CDs, to make the curricula understandable and available to every journalism schools in China.

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The conference lasted two entire days with a series of both local and international speakers covering a wide range of topics revolving around journalism education reform. All speeches were recorded and will be compiled with other sections of this project to take place in the first half of 2010. Over 1000 students and local scholars was recorded to have taken part in the 2 day conference. The coordination was a joint effort from the Tsinghua International Center for Communications, as well as the School of Global Journalism and Communications at the Southwest University of Political Science and Law, in Chongqing.